K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

I can’t win

I spent the better part of the day yesterday trying to recompile a working kernel for my XO laptop, with the intention of replacing the OLPC images I scalped from my Sugar installation and booting purely into Arch.

Of course, it didn’t work, and I’ve decided to put that little project on hold. It takes too long to set it up, takes far too long to compile it, and all the while I’m hunched over the tiny keyboard like some sort of IT Quasimodo. I was feeling foolish after a while.

I’m not terribly disappointed, just frustrated. I used the latest snapshots from the OLPC kernel, tore out the .config from Sugar, double-checked everything and still I get “program errors” when I try to boot.

Sigh.

And as if that wasn’t bad enough, I can’t get the Cairo graphics source package from cairographics.org (the site isn’t responding to me), so I can’t build Openbox on my latest Crux installation.

I’ll have to try again later. Lucky me, I do have my boxes networked and NFS is running in the background on the Crux machine, which means I can stream movies to an Arch box. If you could see and hear me right now, I’d be murmuring an evil laugh and rubbing my hands as I spin up Tron, for the umpteenth time.😈

2 thoughts on “I can’t win”

Actually, I think it was the entire underlying desktop that wanted Cairo. I hadn’t installed any other software yet, so even things like GTK and so forth had yet to be compiled. Something core was drawing it in; I was calling for Openbox, but the underlying dependencies were going all the way back to Cairo. Heh, that sounds funny.😀